Monday, 8 September 2014

British brewing industry structure in the 1860's

Sorry about the title. I really couldn't think of anything better.

This comes from possibly the most frustrating digitised book ever, "Statistics relating to the Brewing Trade". Why frustrating? Because it contains really useful tables which you can't see. Most tables are too big for the pages and are on pullout sheets. WHoever scanned the book didn't bother pulling out these sheets and alll you can see are their blank banks. Fortunately a couple of the tables are readable.

In particular, there's a table of the number of brewing licences issued in 1864, grouped by size of output. Using it, you can get a good impression of the structure of the industry at the time. The first thing that strikes is the sheer number of brewers: 34,679. That's probably more than there are in the whole world today.

Obviously, most of those breweries were very small. The majority were pub breweries, which were still extremely common in many parts of England. In 1857, there were 25,026* "brewing victuallers", as they were quaintly known. Only 20 breweries were brewing more than 100,000 barrels a year. At least five, and probably more, of those were in London. Guinness, Bass and Allsopp are three others in this category. Maybe Beamish, too. Only 40 breweries were making more than 50,000 barrels and 316,000 more than 10,000 barrels. It's clear that there were few breweries operating on truly industrial scale, just a few hundred in the whole country.

To get a better idea of at what scale most beer was being produced, I decided to play with Amsinck's numbers a bit. By estimating how much each brewery in the different bands brewed, I'm able to calculate the total output from each band. For the higher bands it's pretty simple, I've just used the middle point. That doesn't work for the bottom two bands. I know that many pub breweries produced tiny amounts, fewer than 100 barrels a year. And in the second band, many brewers would have been at the bottom end of the range.

Here's the result:

Estimated output per size of brewer

from barrels

to barrels

no. brewers

average barrels per
brewer

total barrels

% of total

0

1,000

31,017

200

6,203,400

27.44%

1,000

10,000

1,647

2,200

3,623,400

16.03%

10,000

20,000

178

15,000

2,670,000

11.81%

20,000

30,000

64

25,000

1,600,000

7.08%

30,000

50,000

34

40,000

1,360,000

6.02%

50,000

100,000

20

75,000

1,500,000

6.64%

100,000

150,000

7

125,000

875,000

3.87%

150,000

200,000

1

175,000

175,000

0.77%

200,000

450,000

4

325,000

1,300,000

5.75%

250,000

300,000

3

275,000

825,000

3.65%

300,000

350,000

0

325,000

0

0.00%

350,000

400,000

1

375,000

375,000

1.66%

400,000

450,000

1

425,000

425,000

1.88%

450,000

500,000

1

475,000

475,000

2.10%

500,000

2

600,000

1,200,000

5.31%

Total

22,606,800

My estimates are a bit out, because in 1865 20,276,623** were estimated to have been brewed in the UK (there is no exact figure), a bit less than the 22.6 million barrels from my guesstimates. But I'm not too far off. You can see that probably a quarter of all beer was brewed by those in the smalklest band. 43% was made by brewers with an output of fewer than 10,000 barrels. 68% came from breweries under 50,000 barrels.

What am I trying to say? That despite having been heavily industrialised and concentrated in some places - london, for example - for a century, most British beer was still being produced on a pretty small scale in the 1860's.

Of course the next 100 years would see the numbers of breweries in Britain forever shrinking and their scale forever growing. Until CAMRA came along.